I love Halloween. It's the only major holiday you can completely ignore. You don't have to buy presents, decorate your house, get dressed up, go to parties, visit people you barely know, or play board games. All these things are options, but not essential ones. So far anyway. I have no doubt that 10 years from now Halloween will have joined the ranks of stress-filled, obligatory, mass produced, culture saturating traditions we all abide by but never really enjoy and always need a holiday to recover from, but for now it's completely optional, which is great. I get a few days off work and I'm not forced to prematurely age 10 years to pay for it.
I might carve a pumpkin because I like the smell. I might watch a horror movie (and by 'watch' I mean 'listen to while babes says “Don't look. Still don't look. Continue not to look. Seriously you don't want to look...OK, you can look now”'), but that's about it for my celebrations.
I liked Halloween when I was a kid. We got plastic masks (do they still make false-faces? The really cheap ones that smelled slightly toxic and gave you nasty cuts around the chin and ears? Ah, those were the days...), and we got a bowl of water with apples in which we 'bobbed' for until mum got sick of us soaking the shag-pile. Dad carved us a turnip which smelled really bad when the candle was lit and we spent literally hours shelling monkey nuts, ending up with a disappointingly small bowl of unflavoured, unsalted, raw nuts and bits of shell, which your uncles then ate on you anyway. And that was it. The whole shebang.
And then we went to America.
I can't even remember where we were in America, but we happened to be there over Halloween. You'd think we'd just arrived from the third world as we staggered around with our chins on the floor. They had fairy lights in the shape of pumpkins. They had witches in their windows and devils on the lawn. Their front doors creaked alarmingly when opened, and kids wandered the streets dressed like the stars of big-budget horror movies. The stores were decorated, the cars were decorated, the streets were decorated, the adults were decorated. You have to understand, we just didn't go in for exhibitionism like that at home. At Christmas if someone in your street had an outdoor tree it was a big deal. America was like a theme park. And all you had to do was put on a witch's hat and people gave you sweets! Bloody brilliant!
I sound like my granny, but this was really only about 20 years ago. We're a bit more cosmopolitan now of course. My own mother has two (count 'em, two) outdoor Christmas trees, don't yew knew. But we're still not big Halloween people. And I think there are advantages to that. It may be great when you're a kid, but major holidays are stressful for adults. If we all toned it down a bit, it would probably be much more enjoyable.
So I say let's all base our Christmas this year on Halloween, Ireland, circa 20 years ago. You can have one plastic tree (max. 3ft), one chocolate item in the festive shape of your choice, two Christmas movies, and absolutely nothing battery powered.
Brilliant.
Let me know how it goes.
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